EDUCATION
2016-2019 School of Pharmacy, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China. Received Ph.D. degree in June, 2019 (Advisor: Prof. Tian-Gang Liu).
2014-2016 School of Pharmacy, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China. Received M.S. degree in June, 2016 (Advisor: Prof. Tian-Gang Liu)
2010-2014 School of Pharmacy, Henan Medical University, Xinxiang, China. Received B.S. Degree in June, 2014.
ACADEMIC CAREER
2026-present, Professor (tenure-track), State Key Laboratory of Elemento-organic Chemistry, College of Chemistry, Nankai University, Tianjin, China.
2021-2026, Postdoctoral associate, Carl Woose Institute of Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (Advisor: Prof. Hui-Min Zhao)
2020-2021, Postdoctoral associate, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China (Advisor: Prof. Zi-Xin Deng)
RESEARCH AREAS
1. Synthetic biology；
2. Natural product genome mining；
3. New-to-nature biosynthesis；
4. Automation and high-throughput；
5. Machine learning/AI
HONORS AND AWARDS
2025 National Natural Science Fund for Excellent Young Scientists Fund Program (Overseas)
EDITORAL BOARDS
2026–present Member, Young Editorial Advisory Board of Chem&Bio Engineering.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Yujie Yuan#, Shu Cheng#, Guangkai Bian#, Pan Yan, Zhengning Ma, Wen Dai, Rong Chen, Shuai Fu, Huiwen Huang, Haoming Chi, Yousheng Cai, Zixin Deng and Tiangang Liu*. Efficient exploration of terpenoid biosynthetic gene clusters in filamentous fungi. (2022) Nature Catalysis, 5, 277–287. (#contribute equally)
Yujie Yuan#, Maolin Li#, Wesley Harrison, Zhengyi Zhang, Huimin Zhao*. Harnessing Photoenzymatic Reactions for Unnatural Biosynthesis in Microorganisms. (2026) Nature Catalysis, 9, 62–72. (#contribute equally)
Yujie Yuan#, Chunshuai Huang#, Nilmani Singh, Guanhua Xun, Huimin Zhao*. Self-resistance Gene-guided, High-throughput Automated Genome Mining of Bioactive Natural Products from Streptomyces. (2025) Cell Systems, 16, 101237. (#contribute equally)
Xixi Sun#, Yujie Yuan#, Qitong Chen#, Shiqi Nie, Jiaxuan Guo, Zutian Ou, Zixin Deng, Tiangang Liu*, Tian Ma*. Multienzyme assembly mediated by docking domains from type I modular polyketide synthases. (2022) Nature Communications, 13, 5541. (#contribute equally)
Maolin Li, Yujie Yuan, Wesley Harrison, Zhengyi Zhang, Huimin Zhao*. Asymmetric Photoenzymatic Incorporation of Fluorinated Motifs into Olefins. (2024) Science, 385(6707), 416-421.
Yujie Yuan, Chengyou Shi, Huimin Zhao*. Machine Learning-enabled Genome Mining and Bioactivity Prediction of Natural Products. (2023) ACS Synthetic Biology, 12 (9), 2650–2662.
